ary interest is concerned, "the real Trojan war," as Mr Grote well says, "is that which is recounted by Homer." It will be sufficient here to take the poet as our main authority, and to fill up his picture from other legendary sources; for though Homer's version of the Great Trojan War is the earliest account which has come down to us, he drew his material from still earlier lays and legends, with which he assumes all his readers (or hearers) to be tolerably familiar; and which, again, the later poets and tragedians reproduced with many additions and variations of their own. The preservation of poems of such great length (the Iliad alone contains between fifteen and sixteen thousand lines) in days when writing, even if invented, was in its infancy, has been the subject of much speculation. That they were publicly recited at great national festivals in all parts of Greece, is undoubted. Professional minstrels, or "rhapsodists," as they were called, chanted certain selected portions which suited their own taste or that of their audience—often such as contained the exploits of some national hero. They followed possibly in this the example of the great bard himself; just as certain of our own popular writers have lately taken to read, to an admiring public, some favourite scenes and chapters from their own works. Lycurgus is said to have brought the collected poems from Asia to Sparta; Solon, at Athens, to have first obliged the minstrels to recite the several portions in due order, SO as to preserve the continuity of the narrative. Pisistratus, the great Athenian ruler, has the reputation of having first reduced the whole into a collected shape, and of having thus far settled the "text" of Homer, employing in this work the most eminent men of letters of his day. There is a legend of a Homeric 'Septuagint:' of seventy learned scribes employed in the great work, as in the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures. From the time when the Iliad and Odyssey were reduced to writing, their popularity rather increased than waned. They were the storehouse of Greek history, genealogy, and antiquity-the models and standards of literary taste. To be unacquainted with these masterpieces, was to be wholly without culture and education: and, thanks to their continual and public recital, this want was perhaps less prevalent amongst the Greeks than amongst ourselves. The young Alcibiades, when receiving the usual education of a Greek gentleman, is said to have struck his tutor one day in a burst of righteous indignation, for having made the confession-certainly inexcusable in his vocation-that he did not possess a copy of the great poet. Alexander the Great carried always with him the copy which had been corrected by his master Aristotle, preserved in a jewelled casket taken amongst the spoils of Darius. No pains were spared in the caligraphy, or costliness in the mountings, of favourite manuscripts of the Homeric poems. They continued to be regarded with almost a superstitious reverence even during the middle ages of Christendom. Men's future destinies were discovered, by a sort of rude divination, in verses selected at hap-hazard. Fantastic writers saw in the two poems nothing more or less than allegorical versions of Hebrew history; and grave physicians recommended as an infallible recipe for a quartan ague, the placing every night a copy of the fourth book of the Iliad under the patient's head. Modern critical speculations have gone quite as far in another direction. In the eyes of some ingenious theorists, this siege of Troy is but "a repetition of the daily siege of the East by the solar powers that every evening are robbed of their brightest treasures in the West ; "* and the Homeric heroes and their exploits all represent allegorically, in one form or another, the great conflict between Light and Darkness. But such questions are beyond the scope of these pages; we are content here to take the tale of Troy as the poet tells it. The supposed date of the story may be taken as some fifteen centuries before the Christian era. The great City of Troy, or Ilium, lay on the coast of Asia Minor its reputed site still bearing the name of the Troad, a broad well-watered champaign, with a height still recognised as the citadel towering above it. "No royal seat of the ancient world," says a modern visitor to the spot, "could boast a grander situation than the Trojan citadel.”+ As to its actual locality and existence, there is little ground for scepticism. The tradition of the name and place was unbroken in the early historical ages of Greece. Xerxes, king of Persia, in his expedition, is said to have visited the citadel, and to have offered there a thousand oxen to the tutelary goddess; possibly, it has been suggested, claiming to be the avenger of the Asiatic kings on their European enemies. Mindarus, the Lacedæmonian admiral, seventy years later, sacrificed there also: and Alexander, when he crossed the Hellespont, not only did the same, but took from the temple some of the sacred arms which * Max Müller; Cox's Tales of Ancient Greece. Grote, Hist. of Greece, i. 271. were hung there (said to be those of the heroes of the great siege), offering up his own in exchange. The founder of the city was Ilus, son of Tros, and from these mythical heroes it took its two names. But its walls were built by the grandson, Laomedon. He employed some remarkable workmen. In one of the most striking and suggestive fables of the Greek mythology, certain of the gods are represented as being condemned by Zeus (or Jupiter) to a period of servitude Poseidon (Neptune) and Apollo were upon earth. under this condemnation, and undertook, for certain rewards, to help Laomedon in his fortifications. But when the work was finished, the ungrateful king repudiated his bargain. As a punishment, a sea-monster is sent to ravage his dominions, who can only be appeased by the sacrifice of a maiden of noble blood. The lot falls upon the king's own daughter, Hesione. It is the original version of St George and the Dragon. Laomedon offers his daughter, and certain horses of immortal breed (which he seems to count even a more valuable prize), to the champion who will deliver her and slay the monster. Hercules comes to the rescue; but a second time Laomedon breaks his word. substitutes mortal horses, and refuses his daughter. Hercules attacks the city, kills Laomedon, and carries off the princess Hesione, whom he gives to his comrade Telamon. From this union are born two heroes, Ajax and his brother Teucer, whom we shall meet in the second and great Siege of Troy, which forms the subject of Homer's Iliad. He This double perjury of Laomedon's is one supposed cause of the wrath of Heaven resting on the town and its people. Yet Apollo, forgetful, it would seem, of his former unworthy treatment, and only remembering with affection the walls which he had helped to build, is represented as taking part with the Trojans in the great struggle, in which the deities of Olympus are bitterly divided amongst themselves. But Homer's Tale of Troy says nothing of Laomedon and his broken faith. His poem is built upon a later legend. This legend embraces in the whole a period of thirty years, divided exactly, in a manner very convenient for both poet and reader, into complete decades; ten years of preparation for the siege, ten occupied in the siege itself (with which alone the Iliad has to do), and ten consumed in the weary wanderings and final return home of the surviving Greek heroes who had taken part in the expedition. The first decade begins with the carrying off from the court of Menelaus, king of Sparta, of his wife Helen, by a young Asiatic prince whom he has entertained in his travels. Helen is the reputed daughter of Jupiter by Leda, and upon her Venus has bestowed the fatal endowment of matchless and irresistible beauty. The young prince whom she unhappily captivates is Paris or Alexander, son of Priam, king of Troy. Terrible oracles had accompanied the birth of him who was to prove the curse of his father's people. His mother Hecuba dreamed that she gave birth to a flaming brand. The child when born was exposed on Mount Ida, so as to insure his death in infancy without incurring the guilt of blood. But, as in similar legends, the precaution did but help to fulfil the prophecy. In the solitudes of the mountain he grew up, a boy of wondrous beauty, the nursling and the favourite of Venus. There he was called upon to decide |